Other
Scientific paper
Sep 1995
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995metic..30r.495c&link_type=abstract
Meteoritics, vol. 30, no. 5, page 495
Other
Scientific paper
The Campo del Cielo meteorite crater field in Argentina contains at least 20 small meteorite craters, but a recent review of the field data and a remote sensing study suggest there may be many more. The fall occurred about 4000 y ago into a uniform loessy soil, and the craters are well enough preserved so that some of their parameters of impact can be determined by excavation. The craters were formed by multi-ton fragments of a type IA meteoroid with abundant silicate inclusions. Relative to the horizontal, the angle of infall was around 10 degrees. Reflecting the low angle of infall, the crater field is elongated with apparent dimensions of 3 x 18.5 km. The largest craters are near the center of this ellipse. This suggests that when the parent meteoroid broke apart the resulting fragments diverged from the original trajectory in inverse relation to their masses and did not undergo size sorting due to atmospheric deceleration. The major axis of the crater field as we know it extends along N58 degrees E, but the azimuths of infall determined by excavation of Craters 9 and 10 are N84 degrees E and N77 degrees E, respectively, suggesting that the major axis of the crater field is not yet well determined. This is supported by the elongation of magnetic anomalies over 4 other craters, all of which trend significantly more easterly than the major axis of the crater field. The 3 or 4 largest craters appear to be explosion craters and the others are shock-wave excavations extended by penetration funnels with multi-ton masses preserved within them. There are two ways in which field research on the Campo del Cielo craterfield is found to be useful. (1)This occurrence of a swarm of projectiles impacting at known angles and similar velocities into a uniform target material provides an excellent field site at which to test the applicability of various existing studies directed toward the interpretation of impact craters on planetary surfaces other than the earth. Given certain assumptions, conclusions based on chemical explosion craters and missile impact craters are found to overlap in estimating an impact velocity for the Crater 10 meteorite of 4.3 - 5.6 km/s. (2) Knowing the mass of the projectile and its velocity, angle and azimuth of impact, there is a possibility to estimate these parameters for the parent meteoroid at entry, and thus learn enough about its orbit to judge whether or not it had its aphelion in the asteroid belt. So far, it has not been possible to do this for observed falls of iron meteorites.
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